Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

There are a few things that WASM can do that JS can't (at least not now):

- Memory management without GC - Unboxed data structures - SIMD - Shared-memory multi-threading - Precompiled snapshots (does not need to be recompiled on page reload)



Bytecode caching has been a browser feature for years[0]

JS has atomics and shared memory arrays which also basically bypass garbage collection [1]

JS had working simd.js implementations in both Firefox and Chrome until they were pulled in favor of WASM

[0] https://v8.dev/blog/code-caching-for-devs

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

[2] https://github.com/tc39/ecmascript_simd

https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2015/03/10/state-of-simd...

https://01.org/blogs/2014/bringing-simd-javascript


I should clarify, in the context of the reply I was referring to security. Wasm is inherently as secure as JavaScript.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: